Helping School Children

of the ways in which the schools are receiving outside aid. The further one reads on, however, the more one is struck with the sense that it is the children who are doing the helping, and it is their parents, neighbors, town officials, and cooperating organizations who are being helped to a fuller social consciousness, to a keener interest in good government and the common welfare. For wherever citizens have been stirred by their own impulses or by the tireless Bureau of Municipal Research to take an active part in helping the schools, there the children have more than repaid the community for efforts made in their behalf. The campaign for health in the schools, for example, has in some measure brought health to the family of every school child. The movement for beautifying school-grounds has extended to the cleaning up by children of back yards and vacant lots, until the aspect of whole cities has been changed for the better. The feeding of school children at the noon recess, and the teaching of cooking in the schools, has gone far to help mothers in preparing cheap, wholesome, and appetizing food. And perhaps best of all, the opening of schoolhouses in the evenings for informal gatherings of parents to see exhibitions of their children's work, has done more than anything else to promote neighborliness and